Astronomers have reportedly discovered a fourth moon orbiting the
tiny ice planet Pluto using the powerful Hubble Space
Telescope. The newly discovered moon, being called P4 until
it is officially named, is smaller than the other three orbiting
the planet, and was discovered during a Hubble survey in which
scientists were looking for rings around Pluto. The
satellite has a diameter of just 8 to 21 miles, the research team
said, compared to a 648 mile diameter of Charon, the
largest.

The discovery is a result of ongoing work to support NASA”s New
Horizons mission, scheduled to fly past Pluto in 2015. The
goal of the mission is to provide new insights about the world at
the edge of our solar system. Hubble's mapping of Pluto's
surface and discovery of its moons will prove invaluable to
planning for New Horizons' close encounter. “This is a
fantastic discovery,” noted Alan Stern of the Southwest Research
Institute in Boulder, CO. “Now that we know there's another
moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it
during our flyby.” Stern is serving as principal
investigator on the New Horizons project.

The new Pluto moon is located between the orbits of Nix and
Hydra, Pluto's other two moons which were discovered in
2005. Pluto's largest moon, Charon, was first observed in
1978 at the US Naval Observatory and resolved as a separate body
from Pluto with Hubble in 1990.

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